Our View: Duncan will continue to play an important role in the Legislature

State Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, continues to be the region’s most respected legislator, and he is going to be important to the state and region as well as the city when the 2013 legislative session begins. We are glad he will be there.

The Texas Legislature had a lot of turnover this year, and there will be a lot of new faces. Enrique Rangel of the A-J’s Austin bureau notes there are 43 new members in the 150-member House and six new members of the 31-member Senate.

The new legislators are going to be unpredictable and will have a steep learning curve, Duncan said. They have to learn to deal with pressure and how to make difficult votes. He said he will make himself available to help anyone who is interested in his advice.

He received similar counsel from John Montford — whom Duncan later replaced in the Senate — when Duncan was first elected to the House in 1992. He said his intention is not to influence the thinking of legislative newbies.

“If I preach to people, they are not going to hear it. If they want to know something, they’ll ask it,” he said.

Duncan had a significant impact in the 2011 legislative session, including his authoring legislation about the state budget and school funding and being part of the budget negotiations between the House and Senate.

Don’t expect him to make any predictions about his role in the upcoming session. He said he has always been careful not to promise things in advance. He also believes it is more effective for a legislator to work with people and accomplish things together rather than to try to get credit for them.

He expects some hot issues in the upcoming session, including the way lawmakers approach the budgeting process and how they move forward within spending limits.

Serious school finance issues are on the table, but Duncan said he thinks the Legislature will, as he put it, kick that can down the road while waiting for a court ruling regarding the lawsuits that have been filed against the state by school districts.

Higher education funding will also be a hot topic, he said, noting it hasn’t been increased to reflect inflation or student population growth for some time.

If Texans want higher education in the state to be competitive with the rest of the nation and to lower the costs of getting an education to students, the Legislature is going to have to fund the basic formula of weighted semester hours, he said.

How President Obama’s Affordable Care Act will be implemented in Texas is going to be another busy issue for state legislators in 2013.

“Until Congress sets better parameters on this, we have a law that nobody knows how it is going to work. The states don’t know how much this will cost,” Duncan said.

The shooting tragedies in Colorado and Connecticut are sure to spark discussion about mental health issues, and he also expects a healthy dialogue about immigration. Although immigration is more of a national issue than it is a state issue, the state part of it is funding law enforcement enhancement on the border.

Duncan was an effective legislator even as a freshman, and he has grown in status, respect and legislative skill since then. Lubbock, Texas Tech and the South Plains will benefit from his experience during the next five months.

At-a-glance

■ Our position: Robert Duncan has experience in both houses of the Texas Legislature, a strong knowledge of issues and the political savvy to make him one of the most effective legislators in the state. After Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst re-appointed him as chairman of the State Affairs Committee last summer, he said of Duncan, “He is a problem-solver whom I have relied on time and time again on a variety of issues. And I will continue to depend on his leadership and judgment this session.”

■ Why you should care: Every citizen in Texas is represented in the Legislature by a senator and a house member. The more skilled the legislators, the more effective is the representation of their constituents.

■ For more information: Log on to our website, www.lubbockonline.com, and enter the words “Robert Duncan” in the search box.

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The only thing that freshmen legislators learn from their predecessors is how to carry the huge bag of money without too much indiscretion. He Duncan and all the bunch from West Texas are in the back pocket of the oil and gas industry, Harold Simmons and others who use their money to get legislation passed and de-regulation. Duncan is as good as they come. He is a crony of the first degree.

What is seriously lacking with our legislators is their falsely perceived power once they're in Office. Duncan is virtually impenetrable, won't meet with constituents, won't communicate, building lines of aides as a wall between him and the voters. Leaders must lead.

Why does he get re-elected? For the same reason others are - voters are uneducated and the region is politicized. Education in a non-partisan milieu is the only answer, and our schools (tax-supported no less) are not maintaining this standard.

It is possible to have a working group that is non-partisan to study the problems in the USA. I'm reminded of the League of Women Voters, "A nonpartisan political organization dedicated to Making Democracy Work through voter education, issue advocacy and citizen participation (http://lwv.org/). In the many years I have been a member in many cities, there was never a time when anyone's political party 'leanings' was allowed, or part of a sincere effort to further a nonpartisan approach to issues affect our government, through education, and advocacy.